Embodiments of the present invention relate to methods and systems for accessing data stored in data warehouses, and in particular to question answering frameworks for structured query languages.
Unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Recently, data warehouses have become information sources of information for decision making and controlling. Progress has been made to support non-technical end-users, by allowing interactive navigation inside complex reports or dashboards. Examples include interactive filtering, or calling Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) operations such as drill-down in a user-friendly way. In addition, effort has been made to make reports or dashboards searchable.
Currently, however, most non-technical users continue to rely upon pre-canned reports provided by a company's IT-department. This is because conventional Business Intelligence (BI) self-service tools still require significant technical insight on the part of the user (e.g. an understanding of the schema of the data warehouse).
Such ongoing reliance upon outside technical knowledge may be cumbersome, particularly because data warehouses have grown dramatically in size and complexity. For example one exemplary use case for BI, is the segmentation of customers to plan marketing campaigns (e.g. to derive the most valuable, middle-aged customers in a certain region).
In this context, it is not unusual for the business users planning such a campaign, to have to cope with hundreds of key performance indicators (KPIs) and attributes. The business users are required to combine this information in an ad-hoc manner in order to cluster their customer base.
A keyword or even natural language-based interface that allows users to formulate their information needs, would ease this task. This is because users are in general more comfortable using unstructured query interfaces, rather than highly structured ones.
Accordingly, the present disclosure addresses these and other issues with data warehouses, and in particular to question answering frameworks for structured query languages.